


The Ballad of Henry Fogg’s Cat

by OceanCandy (PaddlingDingo), PaddlingDingo



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Happy Ending, Post Season 5, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27808999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaddlingDingo/pseuds/OceanCandy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaddlingDingo/pseuds/PaddlingDingo
Summary: Henry Fogg is not a cat person.Unfortunately for him, he has no choice except to figure out how to become one.—Takes place post Season 5; watching S5 is recommended to know how Henry got this cat.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 10





	1. Misery Loves Company

Henry Fogg sat in the chair in his living room, his hand on the orange cat on his lap. Times like this, he felt so old. His body ached, his bones felt tired. All he wanted to do was have a drink but that meant getting up, which meant moving the cat. Then wrangling the cat with him to the cabinet, then trying to poor a drink while it ruined another sweater. After all this time, so many sweaters had been fucking ruined by this fucking cat.

The cat looked up at him, looking as tired of him as he was of the cat. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this tired. The end was surely near, the end of his miserably long life with this cat. It had been years, years of his sweaters getting destroyed, years of scars on his skin, years of claw marks on his leather chair.

He looked down at his had, at the angry red scratch on it. That one would scar for sure, one more to add to the endless ones he’d gotten.

Years.

Or so it felt like. In reality, it had been a week.

But it felt like a _lifetime._

“Well, cat,” he declared, looking down at it. “I want to talk coherently, and I don’t know what you want, so here we fucking are.”

And so went the first week of being psychically linked to a cat to stay sane.

Henry had started to miss being clean. He could smell himself, no amount of trying to get clean with one hand while not setting the cat down would do the job. Today was the day. When was the last time he’d taken a shower? Surely before he went to the other realm and stayed there so Kady could leave.

The least Kady could do was visit, but it required getting through the Brakebills wards, and what would she find if she did visit? An unwashed man unnaturally attached to a cat?

Through the week at work, he’d just done his best to put on clean suits, and make it look like he wasn’t a wreck. As a functional alcoholic, it’s not like he’d never done that before. He was exceedingly good at faking being fine.

Lipson had given him a Look in the last staff meeting, and Henry was certain that it was a matter of time before she started asking awkward questions. Of course she would, that’s what she did. This had been her terrible idea in the first place, even if none of them would speak of it. They’d made up some public story about him needing a cat for therapy. What could was a cat for therapy if he didn’t even _shower?_

Fine. It would be today. “I’m taking a shower if you like it or not.” He scooped up the cat and headed to his bedroom, to dig out a robe. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, but he had to come up with something.

In the bathroom, he opened the shower stall door and stepped inside with the cat. The damned animal was immediately on guard, it’s tail puffing slightly. Where had then even gotten this cursed cat? What horrible thing had it done in it’s life to get stuck with this fate?

Perhaps just living. It’s not like that didn’t ruin enough existences as is.

Henry drew a deep breath, and set the cat down, putting his leg against it. At least if it was going to claw him, it wouldn’t be in the face. He reached up to touch the scratch on his cheek from when the cat had gotten impatient while he had just tried to take a simple shit on the toilet. Everything was drama, from sleeping, to changing his clothes, to trying to cut a steak.

He reached out and put his hand on the knob, ready to turn on the water and ruin his entire day. Perhaps this was how he’d die.

He turned on the water and it blasted over his shoulders, cold. The cat let out a mournful wail as if Henry were literally killing it, and it pulled away from him.

Henry could hardly see the cat trying to open the shower door, as the madness overtook him. Complete gibberish filled his head and his hands started shaking. He felt terrified, and then angry. The sliver of sanity he still held onto knew that this wasn’t fair, that this was wrong.

He shifted towards the cat and put his foot next to it, and the feeling of calm came back over him. No wonder magic like this was illegal. Being this miserable should also be illegal but we don’t always get what we want. For being a master magician, it certainly didn’t feel like it had brought Henry anything but pain and inconvenience.

The water started to warm and the cat hadn’t moved, and Henry breathed a sigh of relief. A sigh that was cut short when the cat let out another horrific murder wail, and stood on his hind legs to sink it’s front claws into Henry’s inner thigh.

“Fuck!” Henry reached down to try to dislodge his wide eyed assailant, but the cat only dug it’s claws in deeper, gouging deep angry red holes into his flesh. The water made the effect worse, and Henry finally managed to get the claws dislodged. The cat turned, got it’s paw between the door and the wall, and pushed it open, bolting from the bathroom and down the hall.

Henry had just enough time to register that he should have shut that door, before his damned gibberish mind took over and he looked around wildly. He didn’t want this, any of this, but it would be what it would be.

He ran from the bathroom, only dimly aware of the trail of water he left behind him, and shouted something that made sense somewhere in his head but the words that came out of his mouth didn’t resemble whatever thought he’d had in the slightest.

Something pulled him towards the cat, the connection helping him find it. He made it to the kitchen and found the cat on top of the refrigerator (how had the miserable creature even gotten up there?). He reached for the cat but it hissed, huddling miserably in the corner. It looked smaller, soaking wet, and he had a brief moment of sympathy for it.

The moment ended with the cat swiped at him, cutting several lines in the top of his hand. He gritted his teeth (being completely crazy had the side effect that he could often blow pain off a lot more easily), and grabbed the cat by the scruff of it’s neck, dragging it down. He carried it like that as it twisted, and his own thoughts sped back into his head.

“I’m not happy either,” he declared, trying to hold onto the cat. “But you’re just as fucking miserable as I am, aren’t you?”

The cat growled as Fogg went back to the bathroom, reaching into the shower to turn the water off. He held the cat outside of the shower, not wanting to make the situation any worse. Then he grabbed a towel off the rack and dropped to the floor, wrapping the cat in it like a burrito.

The cat went part limp, and Henry stared at it. Had it started to…. Purr? Did the wretched thing _like_ being wrapped in a towel?

Cats made absolutely no sense.

It had been a week, and Henry Fogg didn’t know what in the fucking world he was supposed to do with this cat.


	2. A Cat With No Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry adjusts to life with a cat, nuclear shits and all. Plum offers a solution to save his sweaters.

In the weeks that followed, Henry mastered the art of the fastest shower possible. Shut the doors to the bathroom, leave the cat outside of the shower, and hurry in to take the shower. He moved to only using one shower item for everything: shampoo, body wash, anything else. He portioned it ahead of time into a single, small plastic bowl that he set on a ledge, something he’d started doing after he’d attempted to shower without the cat and found shampoo all over the tile later. He’d managed to clean the shower with the use of some clever spellcasting, but he didn’t want to waste any more shampoo because of his own insanity.

So, he kept the cat with him, and showered as fast as possible before the madness caused him to do something completely crazy. Once he’d thrown the bowl, but it had just bounced ineffectually against the wall and hit him in the face. Infuriating but he told himself it was better than being scratched up.

He attempted to use some cleaning spells on himself to try to alleviate the time in between, which helped. The problem was that the cat also got caught up in the spell, and it would spend the next two hours grooming itself in his lap, alternating a series of tongue licks and glares.

“I thought you’re supposed to _like_ being clean,” Henry muttered. The best he’d been able to work out, the cat wanted to be clean on its own terms, and by its own standards.

He supposed it was still better than his blood all over his towels.

One of the worst parts of having a cat was the litter boxes. Henry had several spells that helped him clean them, but it didn’t negate the much worse situation that he still needed to be in contact with the cat or the crazy snuck back in and fucked up his day. He’d taken to putting litter boxes everywhere. By the bed, in the bathroom, in the living room, in the kitchen. Even in his office at work. And he had to follow the cat to the box every time, trying to keep contact with it while desperately covering his nose with the other arm.

“Why have battle magic when we have your shit?” he grumbled, feeling like his eyes would start watering at any second. This had to be illegal in some countries.

It was bad enough that he had to keep a box in almost every room now, just to keep contact with the damned cat. He’d tried keeping it next to the bed so he didn’t have to get up, but that ended after the night he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and stepped squarely in it.

Now he’d stopped feeding the cat at a certain time to try to move the timing around, but it was useless. The cat knew exactly the worst time to get up and leave, and Henry would wake up in the middle of the night panicking because nothing made sense.

He was going to lose his mind. More than he already had, even. A state he didn’t even know was possible.

Was the cure worse than the disease?

Work felt like the only place that everything was mostly fine. He could sit at his desk, hold the cat in his lap, and largely, they’d come to an understanding. At least, mostly. There were moments, but he’d also started using them to his advantage. Nothing had been this effective for ending an unpleasant meeting. A nuclear cat shit or him suddenly busting out in a string of nonsense and waving his arms in the air were both excellent ways to remove himself from otherwise even more uncomfortable situations.

He still had to have a litter box in his office, but worse than that was attempting to use the bathroom at work.

He’d gotten to the point where he could hold the cat and take a piss, but only if he sat down. And he was certain that if some strange rumors hadn’t started about him always taking a cat to the bathroom, well, he was sure it was just a matter of time. He held the tightest during these times, because the last thing he needed was to stumble out of a stall, his pants around his fucking ankles, and yell gibberish at a cat that would just run faster the more he yelled.

Sometimes he hated his life.

“This was my last sweater.”

It wasn’t even his best sweater. The cat had gotten it’s claws stuck too many times, slowly tugging them apart. He would have to move to sweatshirts at this rate.

He’d kept trying to get them repaired, but ended up just buying more of them instead. He ran into Plum on one of these trips. There were few stores he could go to these days, as most would not let the cat in. He had tried to keep it in a carrier and wave it away as the most ugly, loud purse anyone had ever owned, but somehow that didn’t help.

Plum looked at him with sympathy, and reached out to pet the cat. “He looks fat and happy, at least,” she observed. “He is a he, isn’t he?”

“It’s a cat,” Henry growled, resisting the urge to hand her the cat.

“He,” she said definitively, looking from the cat to Henry’s face. “He’s clawing up your clothes.” She moved her hand under the cat’s chin. 

The traitorous fuck started purring. Henry felt protective and pulled the cat back. “He’ll get you, too.”

He hadn’t even thought about it, he’d called the cat he. Curious.

“You could try the claw covers,” she offered. “I worked in a shelter and we promoted it as an option. It’s a humane way to avoid getting scratched.”

Henry glared down at the cat. As much as the cat infuriated him, he couldn’t imagine the alternative of getting the cat declawed. Even he knew that it would be like a magician losing part of their fingers. His hands ached at the thought of it. “How do you put them on a cat when the can’t won’t hold still unless it’s eating, shitting, or sleeping?”

Plum tried to hide her smile. “I’ll come over and help. You hold the cat, and I’ll put them on. I’ll show you, it’s not hard. I’ll bring treats.”

Henry wasn’t sure if she meant the treats were for him or the cat.

She leaned in. “Aw, you’re a good boy, aren’t you?” She looked up at Henry. “I’ll come by tomorrow around ten, if that works.”

The cat closed his eyes and relaxed in Henry’s arms. “That’s fine.”

He was certain that the cat was only purring because Plum was there, but she left and the cat stayed relaxed in his arms, purring. He held him tighter against him and drew in a deep breath. The whole incident felt oddly reassuring.

That night, Henry lay in bed, laying on his side with his arm over the cat. He’d stopped past Lipson’s office to ask where they cat had come from. She’d said that she knew nothing about the cat, or how Henry had gotten it, but that sounded like a good lie due to the fact that him being bonded to this cat was illegal. What she’d told him is that there’s a lot of cats at shelters in need of homes, and that this particular one had been found as a stray. All she knew is that the cat had been in another home, but it hadn’t worked out and he’d been brought back to the shelter.

The thought made him sad, and oddly more protective of the cat. They’d both thought that life would go one way, no doubt, but it hadn’t. While Henry was frustrated with the situation, that wasn’t the cat’s fault

The cat purred, reaching out and putting a paw on Henry’s face. One claw slightly scratched him, but he didn’t mind. For all the inconvenience the cat had been, that wasn’t the cat’s fault, and it was far better than the state he’d been in.

“You’re not so bad, cat.” Someday, he’d have to name this cat. He’d come up with something.

The cat leaned into him and put his head down on his paws, closing his eyes. The purr that emitted from him rumbled through Fogg’s arm. It reassured him; he’d read somewhere that some considered a cat’s purr to be healing. It seemed like the most bizarre thing to think, but perhaps that’s what everyone needed at some point. He certainly wasn’t immune to needing some reassurance.

The cat sighed in his sleep and Fogg closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep.


	3. Compromise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry learns about “toe beans” and wonders if the madness is just beginning.

The next morning, he waited for Plum. He’d like to think he waited patiently, but he knew that was a lie. He paced until his arms were tired from holding the cat. He cast a spell to make him lighter to make it easier, but it seemed to unnerve the cat so he stopped. He really did wish he could teach the cat to stay in a sling so he could go _do_ something interesting. When they sat, the cat kept grooming his paws, sometimes looking up at Henry. He looked strangely content.

A polite knock came at the door, and Henry got up to open the door and welcome his visitor. Plum stood outside, holding a bag in one hand and a box in the other. The box said “donuts” on it, and Henry’s stomach rumbled. He could only subsist on coffee for so long today, he supposed, and that time appeared to be up.

“Come in,” he said gruffly.

Plum followed him to the living room, and he sat down, gesturing to her to sit in a chair across from him. “Welcome to cat hell.”

“I don’t think it’s all that bad,” Plum noted, setting the donuts down on a table. The cat sniffed the air and looked at her, but she shook her head. “Oh, don’t you even think about it,” she warned. She put the bag in her lap and started pull a number of items out, laying them on the table.

Henry watched with detached curiosity, not sure what she was trying to do. Inside the bag were nail trimmers, a bag of cat treats, and packages of small bright pink objects. “You’re going to make his claws… pink.”

“Are you worried the other cats will make fun of him? Because pink is a very universal color.” Plum adjusted the sleeves of the Brakebills sweatshirt she wore, no doubt just for this purpose as he’d never seen her in a sweatshirt before.

“I’ll make fun of him.” Fogg reached out and scratched the cat under the chin. “But I don’t think he’ll even care.”

“Some cats like them,” Plum noted. “Although I don’t know if yours will be one of them. Now, there’s an easy way and a hard way.”

“Easy way,” Henry said quickly. “We’ve had enough complication around here without more of it.”

“Well, you might not like the easy way. The easy way is you hand him to me, I go to another room and take care of it and probably piss off your cat. But I know how to do that without getting scratched up.”

Henry blinked a few times. “That’s the _easy way_?”

“Yes. Because the cat won’t be picking up your stress, or your crazy.” She opened up the package that contained the trimmers. “But it means that you have to sit here and not lose it while I take care of it.”

“Hard way it is,” Henry said with a heavy sigh, settling in.

“Tell me where to get a sturdy towel you don’t care about, just in case.”

He directed her to a closet in the hallway, and waited for her to return, idly stroking the cat’s fur. “Something tells me you’re not going to like any of this.”

Th cat looked up at him and yawned.

Plum returned with a towel that Henry would assuredly classify as one he didn’t give a shit about, and she wiggled it under the cat on Henry’s lap. She sat down. “I’m going to need to hold him firmly but not too tightly, and do your best to keep him calm.”

“Keep him calm,” Fogg slowly repeated. “Yes, well, he’s absorbing the vast majority of my insanity right now, so perhaps you could ask for me put Circumstances back the way they were, or perhaps to magically make my crazy go away.”

“No need to be sarcastic about it.”

“I’m sarcastic about everything, Ms. Chatwin.” He sighed, getting a solid grip on the cat as Plum reached forward to hold one of his paws.

The cat pulled his paws back a number of times, trying to twist in Henry’s grasp, but Henry firmly righted the cat every time until Plum could get in and trim off the tip of the nail. “See, now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

The cat glared at her and she smiled, moving to the next claw. “Only nine more to go.”

Henry did his best to keep consistent pressure on the cat. “Could we just use a sleeping spell?”

“We can, but there’s also a lot of building trust to this.” _Snip. Snip._ “If he woke up and found that we’d done all this, he might not trust us next time we need to do something. It’s best if we do this.” She finished off the paw and set the trimmers down. Pulling out a treat from the bag next to her, she offered it to the cat by placing it on Henry’s leg.

The cat watched her with suspicion, sniffing cautiously at the small disgusting looking brown morsel. Whatever he smelled must have pleased him, as he reached out and started chewing on the treat.

“They’re salmon,” Plum explained.

“It doesn’t smell like salmon.” The “treat” smelled like fishy despair, but the cat liked it so it didn’t matter he supposed. The cat started purring in his arms, backing away from Plum a little and hiding his head in Henry’s armpit.

“Cats are supposedly picky, but yours isn’t.” She looked up at Henry. “You should try giving him more treats, I think he’d appreciate it.”

Henry sighed. That’s just what he needed, to keep bags of treats around with smells like “fishy despair”, “chicken deathwish”, and “beefy hellbeast”, but fine. If that’s what it took to stay slightly more sane in the face of insanity, he’d do it.

He reached out and took a treat out of the bag and set it on his leg, eating the treat then looking extremely pleased with himself. Any moment now he’d remember that Plum had just trimmed his claws, but at the moment he seemed fine with it. “You impossible little shit.” He looked from the cat to Plum. “What’s next?”

Plum opened a package and set out a series of items in front of her. It looked like the most bizarre spell, which made him think. “And there’s no way to make this easier.” 

“You know a lot about magic, and almost nothing about cats. Cats will largely only do what they want, spell or not. You can maybe make them sleep, but for the most part, they’re resistant. That’s what probably made one such a good fit for this spell in particular. A binding spell holds well, but any spell to make a cat do anything is useless.”

Henry felt vaguely annoyed that he had a vast array of magical knowledge, and none of it included cat/magic interaction. “And why does that make a cat a good fit? It sounds like trouble.”

“It means that the cat is loyal to who it chooses first, and it seems this cat has decided you’re fine. Somehow.” Plum smirked and opened up a small tube of what looked like glue. She started filling up the little pink caps to go over the cat’s claws, then quickly started putting them in place.

The cat tensed up at first, especially when Plum touched the bottom of his feet. “I don’t think he likes his toe beans touched,” she remarked, grabbing another cap and putting it on another claw.

“Toe beans.” Henry frowned. This only got more strange. “We can’t just call them toes like any other rational intelligent creature would?”

“You can, but it’s not as fun.” Plum finished off the caps in front of her, then placed another treat in front of the cat. “We’re gonna touch all your toe beans, aren’t we?”

Henry wondered if maybe this was hell, a neverending loop of strange cat slang, scratches, and terminology that made absolutely no fucking sense. “Let’s just get this over with,” he grumbled. Maybe if the cat didn’t want his “toe beans” touched, they shouldn’t be touching them.

“We’re halfway there,” Plum noted, filling another set of little bright pink caps.

Henry wondered if maybe he should have thought about this more first, to ask questions like “will my cat look like he’s been to a fancy nail salon?” and “can we get these in black like a self respecting cat would have?” Well, too late for that now, he supposed.

Plum placed the rest of the caps on the claws and leaned back, grinning. “There. All done.” She held out a treat in her hand, waiting for the cat to take it. “No hard feelings, yeah?”

The cat ate the treat, dropping little fishy despair crumbs in to Plum’s hand. Better there than on his leg, he supposed. He’d be finding this in the couch for days, and reminded himself to cast a few more spells to help keep things clean around here when he had a chance.

Henry reached down and put his hand under one of the paws, feeling the little plastic caps press into his hand. It felt much less alarming than the sharp claws in his hand, and he’d take that. “Well, that’s an improvement. My sweaters have your eternal thanks.”

“Well, don’t give me eternal thanks yet,” Plum noted. “These only last a few weeks.”

“Now that you’d think we could figure out some fucking magic about.” Henry sighed. “It would be better than nothing, I suppose.”

“There could be a spell that acts on the outside of the cat,” Plum noted. “But this isn’t bad once you get used to it.”

 _Get used to it._ It sounded like such a strange conclusion to this. He supposed, though, that the ability to still be himself was worth it.

He just hoped that the cat agreed.

The cat purred as Plum scratched under his chin, and Henry smiled. He couldn’t help it. Maybe this wasn’t so bad after all, but having the ability to go some distance from the cat would certainly help. Perhaps that would be an option, without the urgency of finding a solution that they’d had the first time around.

Henry’s discipline, after all, was Knowledge, and that meant he knew how to find answers.


End file.
